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Technical Library: Creating a Jig for Lasering Italian
Charms
Italian charms are a hot seller for everyone from kids
to adults. Whether designed with a logo for your favorite
sports team or something else, people love them! Now,
imagine being able to create personalized charms by using
your own designs, adding in family member names or special
dates. The ideas are limitless and easy to create using
a simple jig for your laser.
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1) |
It's
difficult to go into a store and be forced to purchase
things only available to you without having some options.
For example, you would like to purchase a charm with
your son's name on it and maybe a symbol (something
that reminds you of him) on it too, and you can't
seem to find that perfect charm anywhere. Well now, you
no longer have to look for that perfect charm because
you can create it yourself!
It's simple and easy to do with three easy steps:
create a jig to hold the charms, spray blank stainless
steel charms, and laser engrave them with your
favorite designs.
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2)
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Creating the Jig
Using a scrap piece of acrylic, setup a
file with several boxes with dimensions of .41" x
.375", each with a fill of 100% black (Figure
1). Each box will hold a separate charm and should
be engraved to a depth where it will allow the charm
to sit sturdily inside without moving. We ran our
jig on a 25 watt Epilog Mini at 15% speed and 100%
power at 1200 DPI.
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3)
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Engraving charms.
Coat the charms with metal marking spray, such as Cermark. Allow your pieces
to dry, applying two coats of metal marking spray on each charm. Once dried,
place the charm in your jig. We have found that if the second coat is put
on close to the time of engraving, we achieve a better mark on the stainless
steel. Also, using a cotton swab to apply the Cermark to the charm allows
you to keep most of the Cermark on top of the charm, rather than in the crevices
on the side, which is more difficult to wash out.
In
CorelDRAW create another small box that is the engraveable
area of the charms (.352" x
.192"). Place your images or words inside the
new box and center that box inside the bigger box you
created on your jig (Figure 2). Place your coated charms
into the jig and run the project, raster only. With
the Epilog Mini, we ran these charms at 20% speed,
100% power.
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4)
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To finish the charms, clean off the spray with water
(Figure 3), and you're done!
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